Artie the Aardvark

Right after taking my dog for her morning walk, today, I made a quick trip to the bakery. I needed to pick up some bread as well as the Christmas cannoli and macaroons. Don't ask me how I recognized him, but I ran into Artie the Aardvark, a "kid" that I hadn't seen in nearly fifty years.

Artie got his nickname in college, but obviously not from a local student. It was an out of town kid who game him the name.

You see, in Boston, the word "aunt" is not pronounced the same as the word "ant."Here is why that's significant.

One night, when a bunch of us were both hammered and stoned, Artie admitted that over spring break, he'd performed cunnilingus on his mom's kid sister, i.e., his own aunt. That's when he forever became Artie the Aardvark. (For the zoologically challenged, an aardvark is an anteater.)

"Artie the Aardvark" I exclaimed when I saw him. He turned scarlet. "Nobody has called me that like forever," he gasped. Well, I could see immediately that I made his whole Christmas. It turns out that his wife was with him and will probably ask him about that nickname. I mean again after right then.

Sorry I missed this. That is one of the funniest stories ever. I have some friends I haven't seen for 50 or so years and several have nicknames I'm sure would embarrass them in front of their spouses, children, grandchildren etc.

Yes, I know... Thanks GOD , I still remember of Dec 15 1970 when I was a very young kid at the Tan Son Nhat airport and took the PAN AM to Guam, Honolulu then San Francisco. Vividly I still remember a young GI at the TSN airport (could be you) who took a picture of me using his KODAK instant camera and gave it to my parents... Can't thank his heart enough

That probably would have been a Polaroid instant camera. I don't recall Kodak having an instant but I could be wrong. I was never at TSN. I left Asia to come back to the World from Clark AFB in the Philippines. My ride home was a USAF Reserve C-141, the Lockheed "Star Lifter". After takeoff from Clark, we overflew Hanoi at around 50,000 feet so that the Air Force plane crew could get combat pay for the month. This was in December of 1971. For awhile our ground speed was 792 mph which is supersonic. The flight was non-stop to Travis AFB outside of Frisco. The seats were webbed cargo storage nets hung against the plane's bulkheads. Just me and four or five Marines in this humongous cargo hold.

Funny story about the Polaroid instant camera. My father was big into the latest audio and photographic gear and bought the first Polaroid Land camera around 1958 or so and he taught me to use it. In the summer of 1959, he brought the family to Europe. He flew over a month early and my mother, her step father and I took the Queen Elizabeth from Manhattan to Southhampton UK. Then we flew (my mother and my first flight) from Glasgow to Berlin. After a few days, my father and I flew a Lufthansa DC3 from Berlin to Copenhagen. Besides the crew which was German, my father and I were the only round eyes on the flight. The rest of the passengers were Japanese businessmen--50 or 60 of them. My father always sat in the rear of airplanes due to his then current knowledge of crash survivability and all the Japanese men were in front of us. They were all dressed in identical black suites, white dress shirts and black ties. Almost all of them wore thick black-rimmed glasses. So about an hour after we took off, my old man breaks out the Polaroid Land and several packs of film (8 shots each, black and white) and a couple of packs of flashbulbs. He commences to shoot the Japanese who turn around and smile at us all the time rapping in Japanese. After each shot, my father handed me the film and I peeled off the plastic covers and coated the photos with the fixing gel. In slightly over a minute, my father takes the first photo, walks up the aisle, and hands it to a Jap. The entire contingent went into a frenzy since they'd never seen an instant camera before. In the end, we must have given them 40-50 pictures and they were all bowing to us like we were alien gods.